March, 1942. Tetsuo Tsutsui, pilot in the Japanese Army, in the service of His Majesty the Emperor in the war against America, is writing to his fiancée, whom he has never met. A noted interpreter of Mozart, Fumika is just starting her career as a concert-pianist at the Conservatory of Berkeley – in enemy territory. Indifferent, she doesn’t want this warrior for a husband, and hopes to escape her fate. In Berkeley, she meets Wolfgang, who has fled Nazi Germany and is working for Oppenheimer. A brilliant physicist, he will turn out to be a key player in many episodes of building the first atomic bomb. The bomb that, curiously, is supposed to bring Peace.
In April 1942, along with 5,000 other people of Japanese nationality or descent, Fumika is sent to an assembly center and then transferred to an internment camp in Santa Fe, where she will encounter Wolfgang once again, only in strange circumstances. Betrayed and denounced, she will be exchanged for an American prisoner of war and sent back to Japan, where she will find Nagasaki reduced to rubble.

The subject of Daniel de Roulet’s latest novel is the first A-Bomb. The journalist-author’s investigation will hardly dispel honest readers’ anxiety. Between the lines, the novelist asks the eternal question: what should we hang onto in life: the enchantment of science or the beauty of music?